Delayed Gratification
by mosylu
Summary: Jyn hasn't seen Cassian for thirty-four days and she's missed him like crazy. But before they can really indulge in their reunion, other stuff has to come first. It always does, in wartime. An everyone lives AU with established Rebelcaptain.


"And you're sure this - " Draven glanced down at his datapad to check the name, "Quribar won't shoot you on sight?"

"Pretty sure," Jyn lied.

Draven looked skeptical.

"It's been a few years," she admitted. "But sorosso berries are the main ingredient for his favorite dessert. With the blockades, getting them from Bixhai is a pain these days. If I turn up with a pound of them, he might adopt me." Or shoot her, for clearly bribing him. It depended on his mood. She kept that to herself.

Draven opened his mouth, and his commlink beeped. He listened, angled a screen to read it where Jyn couldn't see, and muttered, "Report immediately," into the 'link. He looked up. "You're dismissed, Erso. We'll pick this up at eighteen-hundred hours."

"Sir," she said, saluting. The spymaster gave her an inscrutable look, which she considered unfair. Her salutes weren't nearly so sarcastic these days.

She left his office and strode down the hall, her mind buzzing. Report immediately - so it was someone who'd just landed, with news. Another one of his spies, come back from a mission.

He had a lot of spies out in the stars at the moment. Most of them weren't Cassian Andor.

Her heart thumped hard. She hadn't seen him in thirty-four days, her last mission having perfectly overlapped his downtime. When she'd gotten back, she'd found a message tucked under the pillow - _I'm fine, be safe_ \- and she'd kicked a hole in the wall.

And she was leaving again, the day after tomorrow.

The great majority of Draven's spies weren't Cassian Andor, she reminded herself.

She turned down a corridor and saw him, just turning down the other end. Her heart jolted once, hard, and she swallowed it down.

He looked up and saw her at the same time.

They both kept walking, no stumbles, no wobbles, no hesitation, passing other rebels going about the small, petty affairs necessarily attached to toppling a tyrannical regime.

You would miss him, she thought, as she always did. He faded into the crowd, any crowd. Every crowd.

His lean, self-contained body, dressed as always in various shades of drab. The way he moved, smoothly, keeping pace with the walkers around him, not swaggering, not scuttling, just another someone with a place to be. His features, like the actual definition of nondescript. They needed emotion to bring them to life, to crinkle up his eyes and flash his teeth. But he made sure that didn't happen, that his default expression made the eye slide over him. It wasn't deliberately blank, but instead mildly bored and thinking about other things, like a commuter who was about to open up a datapad and start working on something deathly dull.

You'd miss him, because he intended you to.

She always felt like she knew a secret when she found him in a crowd. And she always found him.

She drank him in. The set of his jaw, the line of his mouth, the fluff of his hair, the cool flicker of his eyes across all the faces in the hallway but returning over and over again to hers.

His clothes looked travel-crumpled but not ripped or stained. His hair was shorter than usual and his beard just a bare scruff, so he'd had to alter his appearance. The angles of his face were still sharp but not knife-like. All his limbs seemed to be intact. No limping or stiffness in his steps, and he carried a bag in either hand, evenly balanced, so his upper body seemed all right as well.

They met in the center of the corridor. "Captain," she said. _You're back._

"Sergeant," he returned. _You're here._

People eddied around them, a few casting curious glances but most focused on their own concerns.

She put her hand in the crook of his elbow for a split second, and felt the muscle shift under her touch. Warmth spread from her fingertips down her hand and arm, all the way to her dancing heart.

Their eyes met and held for a long, humming moment. His flat, solemn mouth curved slightly upward. She smiled back.

She dropped her hand and continued on her way. So did he. They both had things to do. He had a report to deliver to Draven and she had research to get started on.

But he was here. She'd felt his warmth and looked into his eyes and seen him standing upright and unharmed. A piece of her that had been coiled tight for thirty-four days unwound with a sigh.

* * *

Two hours later, she was outside Draven's door again. It whooshed open and Cassian stepped out. He paused, seeing her. His eyes warmed.

"I've got a meeting with Draven," she said.

To anyone else, it would look as if his expression didn't change. But she saw his lashes flicker, the faint upward curve of his mouth droop, the slight sag of his shoulders. "When?" he asked, and she knew he didn't mean the meeting.

"Day after tomorrow," she said, looking at him closely. His eyes didn't carry shadows - or at least, no new shadows. The lines around his mouth weren't dug any deeper. It hadn't been too bad, then.

He nodded. "I'm going to take a shower and then to dinner."

"Right," she said. "I won't be long."

It wasn't a thing she could promise, but they made impossible promises to each other all the time.

He cupped her neck and she rested her cheek against his wrist for a split second. Then Draven's door whooshed open, and they pulled apart. If the spymaster had noticed the moment, he didn't let on.

* * *

Forty-five minutes with Draven, and she was free to head straight to the canteen, loud and crowded. Still, she didn't have to look hard to find hm.

"Jyn!" Bodhi yelled out. "Look who's home."

Across the table, Cassian lifted his head and gave her one of his quiet smiles.

"I saw," she said, sliding in next to him. His leg pressed against hers, warm and strong. He smelled of the shower, all cheap harsh soap and clean wet hair. When she surreptitiously checked, the exposed skin she could see looked fine - not scrubbed raw or boiled pink. Sometimes he did that when he came home, as if trying to scour things away that were sunk too deep. Sometimes she did too.

He nudged a plate her way. He'd put another plate over top of it, so the food was warm. Tasteless, of course, which wasn't Cassian's fault, but warm. Under the table, she pressed his leg back.

Bodhi looked disappointed in them. He was the kind of person who would tear across a crowded room to seize his lover and have a noisy, joyful reunion while people dodged flailing limbs and looked on with indulgent faces. He didn't understand their habitual restraint. He always looked like they'd taken away his cookie when they greeted each other with ranks instead of endearments.

 _It's not that it's a secret,_ Jyn had told him once. _It's that it's nobody's business. Us. We're nobody's business. Anyway, everyone has other things to be concerned about._

 _Yes they do,_ Bodhi had said, _that's why it's so interesting to be concerned about you._

Which made no sense, honestly.

She took a moment to study Bodhi, too, and found his smile mostly convincing today, his chatter mostly unforced. Good, then. There had been a lot of days recently where neither of those had been true.

Cassian ate his dinner quietly, but with good appetite, good enough that Jyn could focus on her own. She watched him smiling at their friend as he filled him in about the small scandals and triumphs of the base.

Bodhi was popular, in spite of a rough start being known as the Imperial defector. Which wasn't fair, really; weren't they all Imperial defectors in some way? Before Alderaan, most of the Council had done it on their time off from being _Senators_ , for kriff's sake.

He'd passed all the fighter pilots' tests and simulations, and Jyn tried not to worry every time she saw him suited up in orange, climbing into a cockpit. She generally failed.

They were in a war, she reminded herself. Bodhi worried about her and Cassian when they were out on missions that they couldn't talk about when they came back. Cassian worried about both of them. It was a feedback loop of danger and duty and missing each other and every so often moments like this, them all together, the strange little family that Scarif had made.

She wished that Chirrut and Baze had elected to stay with the Rebellion, although she understood why they couldn't. They didn't belong in an army.

She wondered sometimes what the monks would have made of Luke Skywalker, all bright open face and wide aw-shucks eyes with the ghost, or the embryo, of something more behind them. The way he would talk about someday finding out more about the Force and the Jedi, and how he carried an actual lightsaber on his belt with the same ease that Cassian carried three guns and Jyn, four vibroblades.

Maybe they would come back someday and she could find out.

She stopped thinking about the pilot when Cassian's warm hand slipped under the table and settled on her thigh. She looked at him sideways. He looked as if he were paying complete attention to Bodhi's story of some improbable love triangle within one of the other squadrons, a story Jyn had witnessed in real time so was ignoring. A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

She shifted her leg so her thigh flexed under his palm, and the smile quirked a little wider. His fingers traced little circles on the tender inside of her knee and meandered up the inseam of her trousers, spreading heat in their wake. They lingered, reversed direction, drifted back to her knee, reversed direction again.

"Are you done?" she asked him.

He raised a brow, then looked down at his plate. The smile he gave her was pure mischief. "With that? Yes."

Bodhi paused in his story and looked at them both narrow-eyed.

"Finish up your story," she said to him, and to Cassian, "You won't believe the end. Seriously." She took Cassian's plate along with her own.

"Jyn," Bodhi called out, and she paused.

He looked sardonic. "If the two of you come up for air by noontime tomorrow, I have the afternoon off."

He didn't know she was leaving the day after next, or at least, she hadn't told him. He seemed to pick up on things like that, though. She smiled at him. "All right. A couple of hours."

He smiled back, hearing the unspoken promise, and turned back to Cassian to finish up his story. Which really did have a rather surprising ending.

She had to get in line for the recycler, and found herself right behind one-point-five meters of undiluted imperiosity. "Princess," she said, nodding.

"Sergeant," Princess Leia said, nodding back. "I hear you're going to see what you can pry out of Quribar."

"That's the plan." Jyn was feeling kindly toward her these days, after an evening getting spectacularly drunk together a few weeks ago. For someone who looked like she belonged on a music box, Leia sure could put away the rum. And anyone with the title Princess shouldn't be able to supply quite so many new verses to the song about the nexu that couldn't be buggered at all.

Her kindly feelings dissolved when Leia said, "So, who's your team for this mission?"

"No," Jyn said.

Leia blinked. "What?"

"Leave me out of it."

"Out of what? I was making small talk."

"No you weren't. You were fishing. Badly. Look, if you want to know whether the Millennium Falcon is carting me to the Outer Rim, you ask Han Solo yourself. I have better things to do than serve as a go-between in your weird little mating dance."

" _Mating_ dance," Leia squawked. "As if I would ever - "

No, but she wanted to, Jyn knew. Oh, how she wanted to.

"Spare me," she suggested. "He's around. Ask him yourself."

Leia glared and started to say something else infuriating when she paused, her eyes flickering over Jyn's shoulder.

Without looking, Jyn knew Cassian had come up behind her. The tingle in her spine told her more than any visual confirmation.

"Well," Leia said, and the expression on her face might have been a smirk on anyone else. "I see you do have better things to do. Captain Andor, good to see you back."

"Thank you, Your Highness."

She looked back at Jyn, her sharp chin angling upward, all princess. "I'll let Captain Solo know he'd better bring you back in one piece."

"Thanks," Jyn said, thinking, _see, that's how you fish._ "And I'll make sure he doesn't do anything too stupid."

"Well, that's a full-time job," Leia said, and headed out the door, probably headed for the Falcon's berth. Jyn briefly considered warning Solo and shrugged. If he couldn't handle her, he deserved what he got.

"Was that an argument?" Cassian asked her in the corridor. "I couldn't tell."

"No," she said. "Just being honest with her, like more people should."

There was a laugh in his voice. "Are you two ever going to admit that you like each other?"

"We don't like each other," she grumbled. "Shut up."

"Respect each other, then."

"Sometimes."

"More than sometimes."

At their room, she slapped the door open and spun to grab his shirt. "You want to talk about Princess Leia right now?"

He grinned down at her, warm, happy lines raying out from his eyes and bracketing his mouth. "No."

She grinned back and dragged him inside.

* * *

Sometime later, her heartbeat slowed and her breathing evened out. With her naked legs wrapped around his waist, and her back braced up against the door, she buried her face in his neck and mumbled, "You mad randy bastard, there's a bed three steps away."

He laughed into her ear. "Too far."

He moved to let her down, and she tightened her arms with a grumble of protest. She'd missed this too much - his smell, his skin, the steady thud of his heart next to hers, the scratch of his beard against her cheek - to let him go just yet. From the way he tucked his face into her hair, he felt the same.

Eventually, with one last kiss, they separated. They both peeled off the rest of their clothes and got cleaned up. When she came back from the 'fresher, he was bent over picking up all their clothes and chucking them into the laundry.

He was almost obsessively neat and tidy, which made cohabitation rough sometimes because she suffered from a debilitating lack of fucks to give for clutter. She'd missed him so much that she'd actually cleaned the room this morning, before she knew he was on his way back. At the time, she'd called herself a sappy, hopeless fool, but now she blessed her own intuition.

Not so much that she was going to be picking things up now, of course. Not when she could enjoy the sight of him doing it instead. Instead she perched herself on their bed and did just that for awhile, drinking in the arch of his lean back, his excellent ass, his arms ropy with muscle.

She cleared her throat. "In case you haven't noticed, Captain, there _is_ a naked woman in your bed."

He tossed her shirt and one of his socks at the laundry hamper and grinned at her over his shoulder. "I'd noticed."

She grinned back at him and crooked her finger.

Just to annoy her, he delayed long enough to deposit his other sock in the laundry. She was rolling her eyes when he climbed onto the bed facing her and took her face in his hands to kiss her again.

She smiled at him and shook her head. Then she planted her hand in the middle of his chest and shoved just hard enough that he flopped backwards, sprawling on the pillow with a sigh of relief. "Me first?"

"You've had _two_ missions since we saw each other," she said. "And I was only gone a week on my one. Yes, you first."

She crawled over him and kissed his nose. "How long have you been awake today?"

He reached up behind her head and tugged the band out of her hair. Her habitual knot dissolved and her hair fell around her shoulders and her face, just brushing his cheeks. He combed his fingers through the ends, smiling at her. "About eighteen hours."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "And about how much sleep before that?"

He shrugged. "I didn't get hurt," he said.

She let out her breath in a huff and ran her hands over his chest, hunting for injuries. She tapped a scar on his bicep, remembered that it was old, and continued. He said in a soft voice, "I slipped, it was nothing, truly," when she found a yellowed smear of a bruise on his hip and glared at him for it.

"Tell me," she said, and he told her about the ice in the alley as he was scrambling out of sight. He hadn't even been able to grunt when he went down hard, and he'd had to roll quickly into the shadows to avoid the stormtroopers' eyes when they poked their heads in.

The way he talked around what he was doing, where he'd been, why he'd been avoiding the stormtroopers at all told her it was the kind of mission he couldn't talk to anyone about. Even her. She saved him the trouble of not answering by not asking, and smoothed her hand over the bruise as if she could wipe it away. But it remained.

When she asked about the blisters on his heel, newer than the bruise, he was able to talk freely about the long hike through the mountains on a planet in the Inner Rim to recon an Imperial scientific installation, take note of their projects and the material being brought in, and then the long hike back that raised the blisters.

"Bad boots," he said, wrinkling his nose.

"Worse socks," she grumbled.

"Fine, I'll get new socks," he said, and she gave the side of his knee a brief massage. He'd wrenched it badly a few months back and it still made him limp every now and then. Though he hadn't been limping today, that hike probably hadn't done it any good.

"Are you satisfied?" he asked when she'd worked her way down to his ankles and back up his back again.

"Yes," she said.

"Good," he said, rolling quickly and dropping her to the mattress. "My turn."

She let her eyes slide half-closed, luxuriating in the warm of his hands sliding over her skin as he checked her over.

"This is new," he murmured, finding a fresh scar, still faintly discolored by bacta. He pressed his lips to the knotted skin. "Tell me."

A knife fight at the court of a petty little kingling who ruled over a petty little moon - "strictly ceremonial," she said, and he said, "This doesn't look ceremonial" and she said, "Well, you know, different definitions of ceremonial" - that had ended in an official agreement to allow Rebellion scientists access to their frankly gigantic library of poisons and antidotes.

"Nicely done," he said, smoothing her hair out of her eyes. "And what else happened?"

She was silent, staring up at the ceiling. He waited.

"The mountains," she said finally. "Around his palace. They looked - " She held out her hand and gave it a swoop upwards. "Sort of skinny and scooped out. Like - " She swallowed. "- like Lah'mu."

He let out his breath, almost in a sigh. His hand stroked her hair again.

She met his eyes. "I did the job."

"I know."

She twisted up her mouth. "I don't imagine I was very pleasant after."

He brought her hand to his lips. "You didn't get in any fights," he observed, brushing a kiss on her knuckles. "Besides the ceremonial one with the knives."

"No, but I did go drinking with Bodhi every night for a week when I got back."

"Your poor liver." He stretched out alongside her and kissed her temple. She turned her face into his shoulder.

"He's better," she said, muffled. "Bodhi. That happened when you were here, didn't it?"

"Mm," he said, accepting that she didn't want to talk about Lah'mu anymore, but still holding her close. "I left with a hangover that didn't lift until I was almost there."

She sighed. "I told him he was going to fall in love with her."

"I'm surprised you didn't punch her in the face, at least. For breaking his heart."

"Why should I? She was honest with him about what she could give from the start. The idiot broke his own heart." She snorted, then sighed again, because Bodhi really had been a mess after Lomana had dumped him. Poor stupid broken hearted Bodhi. And Leia all knotted up with her own unwillingness to admit what she wanted. "Love is nothing but trouble."

"I wouldn't say _nothing_ but trouble," he said.

She rolled her head on his shoulder to look into his eyes. Their noses bumped, almost a nuzzle. His dark eyes were calm and steady and she could see everything in them, the deep, covered well of this man who somehow loved her as much as she loved him. To her very great and ongoing surprise, in spite of their secrets and their dysfunctions and their absences and hell, just this kriffing war, it somehow still worked.

 _They_ worked.

"No," she said. "I guess not."

FINIS


End file.
